Wednesday, April 04, 2012

After
weeks of trial balloons, alarums, and even excursions, the Muslim Brothers
finally decided to nominate Joseph for the presidency of Egypt. Well not exactly. They’ve actually decided to nominate
one of their most important leaders, Khairat Shater, for the presidency. Freshly
printed posters identify Shater, imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, with the
Biblical (and Quranic) Joseph who emerged from prison to govern Egypt.

The
decision to nominate Shater is widely described, especially outside Egypt, as a
surprise although it has already been the subject of weeks if not months of
intense speculation.

One strong reason for not
nominating Shater was that the Muslim Brothers have asserted continuously during
the past year that they would not nominate a candidate for the presidency. Shater was quoted a year ago as saying
the MB would not support an MB candidate even if it was himself. So the MB have, not for the first time, broken a
promise about the elections. And the
reason they gave for expelling former leader Abdel Munim Abu al-Futouh was his
insistence on running for the presidency despite that decision. If the Brotherhood has broken promises
(running for only 25% of the seats in parliament, for example) they are not
alone. The Supreme Council of the
Armed Forces once promised a six month transition but it’s also become
clear in the past few months that the Brotherhood, and their political party
(Freedom and Justice), have quickly acquired the knack of all large parties in
democracies of denying what they’re going to do until the moment they do it.

Some analysts have suggested that
the MB is squeezed between the Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, variously described as
the Salafi candidate, an ultra-hardline Islamist, or a populist, and the liberal
Abu al-Futouh. Much of the talk in
Cairo before Shater’s nomination, however, was that he would draw at least the
support of the Salafi religious and partisan leadership to his side. This already is underway as some
leaders of the Salafi Nour party, which has consistently declined to back Abu
Ismail or any other candidate until the nomination period ends, have announced
their support for Shater.

Shater is part of a group of
leaders, including Supreme Guide Mohammad Badie, Saad Katatny and Muhammad Morsi,
who dominated the leadership after the former Supreme Guide stepped down in
2009. With the departure of Abu
al-Futouh and several other leaders associated with the liberal wing of the MB
they have increased their control over the organization further in the last
year. Yet, if press reports are
correct, they have not yet been able to bring the entire organization under
their influence: the vote to
nominate Shater had to be postponed for a week and even then he was nominated with
a majority of 56 votes to 52 in the organization’s Shoura Council. There are also reports that a large
majority of the members of parliament who nominally represent the Freedom and
Justice party (rather than the MB) also opposed his nomination.

That the Brotherhood, in theory not
a political organization, decided to take the decision to nominate Shater (who
held no official position in the party) rather than having the FJP nominate him
is worth noting. It suggests an
emergent gap between the MB leadership and the FJP both as parliamentary
faction and as an electoral organization.
There are, as I will discuss below, reasons to believe that the MB
leadership is having increasing difficulty controlling its own base as well as
its parliamentary delegation.

Accounts of why the MB (rather than
its political wing, the FJP) decided to nominate Shater propose several
possibilities whose contradictory nature suggests how little the world outside
knows of the inner workings of the MB.
It has been suggested both that Shater’s nomination is the result of an
agreement with the military council and is a result of the breakdown of any
possibility of agreement with it. Some
have suggested that the MB leadership fear being displaced as the leaders of
the Islamic trend in Egypt if either Abu al-Futouh or the Salafi candidate Hazem
Salah Abu Ismail win. Yet another
possibility posed by Egyptian scholar Ashraf al-Sherif is that the decision arose
from Shater’s visceral dislike of Abu al-Futouh who may have had significant
support among the losing 52 members of the Shoura Council.

I make no claim to know much about
the internal (or even the external) workings of the MB. Over the past year, however, various
accounts of how they have come to make decisions that violate previous
promises, coupled with what little we know about prominent leaders who have
left, and the recent uproar over the presidential election are suggestive of a
much more complex organization than appears in many popular accounts
circulating in the US which frequently describe either an extraordinarily
disciplined cadre organization dedicated to violently imposing Islamic law on
Egypt or a group of democratic moderates barely distinguishable from the
American median voter. There is
little doubt that the present leadership group (which may no longer include
Shater who has formally resigned) is strongly attracted to power, that they are
socially quite conservative and that they largely understand democracy to mean
the unrestricted rule by the majority, at least as long as they constitute that
majority. There is, at present, no
reason to believe that their preferences would be for an economic program much
different than what dominated the past decade. Shater is an astute businessman who has become quite
wealthy.

Shater himself has said that
instituting Islamic sharia is the number one goal of his movement and
presumably of his presidency. What
this means in practice, apart from significantly restricting a wide variety of
relatively recently enacted women’s rights, is unclear. Given the general stance of the current
leadership it does not mean much good from a progressive point of view but just
how broadly and severely it will impact Egyptian civil and penal law as well as
social norms is uncertain. About a
month ago members of the Nour party proposed writing a law to transform the
Quranic penalty for hirabah into
law. In the Quran the term means
waging war on God or Muhammad. In
the Islamic Republic of Iran the term now covers a wide variety of vaguely
defined offenses against the state and the Nour parliamentarians appear to have
been thinking of a similarly broad statue that would cover political and
economic crimes that affect society at large. Whether it would be possible to write the text of a law that
would be acceptable to the Egyptian judiciary is unclear and no working
document has emerged from the Ministry of Justice nor is it clear whether most
Egyptians would be willing to support a law whose penalties included the
amputation of opposite limbs or crucifixion. Egyptian constitutions have traditionally prohibited exile
as a punishment (although the present Constitutional declaration does not
contain this prohibition) which is another possibility mentioned in the
Quran. In fact most would probably
be appalled. Egyptian law
has a significant number of crimes for which death is a penalty (armed robbery,
murder, and rape to name but a few) and it has some laws criminalizing vaguely
defined behavior (“ill-gotten gains” for example) but the two are not usually
linked and there is historically well-grounded support for the idea of the rule
of law that would resist the imposition of such laws whether under the color of
Islam or not.

Shater and his political allies
might be better thought of as devotees of state that will be both more punitive
and more active whether Islamic or not. Historically the MB, like the Communist
parties (and unlike the other European mass parties) have not formally allowed
factions, but this does not mean that the MB had no factions. Even in the 1950s there were clearly
identifiable groups within the organization and there are reasons to believe
that factionalization intensified with the generation that entered in the 1980s
even if it remained formally unspoken.
Although it has been common to speak of the disciplined hierarchy of the
MB and of both generational and political change within the organization these
are usually presented as transformations of a relatively homogenous and
disciplined organization. It may
be more useful to think of the MB as a kind of coalition—that is a rather broad
array of people of social and political outlooks—which now has access to
considerable possibilities of patronage and government decision-making. Paradoxically it may make the present
leadership stronger in relationship to other factions—which are still
illegitimate as such—while also making more amenable to influence from the base. Thus the decision to jettison the
pledge to contest only 25% of the seats in parliament and run everywhere
benefited the current leadership and the organization. But it was widely reported (at least
unofficially) at the time also to have been the result of pressure from the
base where many members believed they could successfully run and resisted
leadership attempts to limit their access to power. So, too, the decision to dominate the constitutional
committee has been described to me as having been the result of the desire of
FJP and Nour parliamentarians to serve on the committee. Seen in this light, the MB leadership
may originally have planned to play a longer and more involved political game
but are now having difficulty controlling their own members. Lastly it is clear that the decision
not to run a presidential candidate has evoked significant opposition within
the organization for the entire past year. Some of this came from Abu al-Futouh supporters; some from
those who worried that Abu Ismail would cut into their own base; and some,
obviously, from Shater and his faction.
Whether the MB splits, which is an ever-green hope in some circles, is
less of an issue that its on-going transformation into a regular political
party in which various groups vie for power in increasingly public and
organizationally debilitating ways.

The Muslim Brothers are now on the
verge of dominating the Egyptian political system nearly as completely as did
the National Democratic party.
They have close to a majority in the Parliament and on a variety of
issues have their pick of allies; they dominate the committee presently writing
the constitution. Their same man, Saad Katatny, happens to be both speaker of
the Assembly and chair of the constitutional committee. Should they also gain
the presidency they will control both the legislative and executive branches
and they will be in a position to determine, through the writing of the
constitution, the distribution of power between them. In early
2011 they may have wanted to re-assure Egyptians and foreigners alike that they
did not intend to dominate the political system. The parliamentary elections and the response of the
electorate to the MB dominance of the constitutional committee suggests they no
longer need to allay these fears.

In the vein of such speculation
another possibility also arises:
the MB leadership realize (perhaps more than any other forces) that
their dominance based on popularity alone may be a wasting asset. The MB claimed support from 77% of the voters in the March
2011 referendum. In recent
parliamentary elections the Islamic trend overall received 70% of the vote but the
FJP (the political arm of the MB) received less than 50% although their
coalition came close to that mark.
Contesting the presidency five (or more) years in the future after
former Mubarak foreign minister Amr Moussa (the front-runner) or any of the other
competitors may seem much less desirable now than it did a year ago. I leave to connoisseurs of choice
theoretic approaches whether it is more “rational” for the MB to wait to
capture the presidency in the future, but the given the uncertainty surrounding
this presidential election (let alone those five or ten years in the future)
patient forbearance may look like a fool’s game.

There are some intriguing
possibilities ahead that make the Egyptian presidential campaign resemble the
American collegiate basketball playoffs in the variety of possible
opponents. There are certainly
risks involved. Shater as nominee
would have likely picked up much of the Salafi vote that Abu Ismail hoped
for. The stunning decision by the
Electoral Commission on April 4 to deny Abu Ismail’s candidacy leaves Shater
more clearly the preferred nominee of those voters. Abu Ismail’s candidacy was negated on the technicality that
his mother appears to have had an American passport. Under the constitution amendments approved in the March 2011
referendum and incorporated into the Military Council’s Constitutional
Declaration no one whose parents have accepted foreign citizenship may serve as
Egypt’s president. And the
decision of the Commission is, by the same Declaration, without appeal.

There remains some question as to
whether Shater’s candidacy will survive a challenge. Shater’s parents and grandparents are, as far as anyone
knows, Egyptian born but he has been convicted of a felony in a sufficiently
recent period that his political rights (including the right to stand for
public office) may be in abeyance. No doubt this will be brought before the
Electoral Commission which could decide that his candidacy, like that of Abu
Ismail, is invalid. It is not clear whether the Military Council can or would
pardon him and restore his rights.

More intriguing is what happens if
Shater wins. Although Shater has
resigned from the MB (and thus also as deputy supreme guide) he, unlike Abu
Al-Futouh, remains closely identified with it. After all it was the MB that nominated him. If he wins, then, what is the
relationship between the Supreme Guide of the MB, Muhammad Badi’, and his
former Deputy, the President of Egypt?
Is the president still bound by, or will he feel himself bound by, the
rule of obedience which characterizes the relationship of members to the
leadership in the MB? Or will he,
as president, now be in a position to demand compliance from his former
superior? Either way the MB will
have to adjust to an uncomfortable new reality in which it either is quite
literally the ruling party or the transmission belt for government.

Shater’s entry into the
presidential race may also affect the writing of the constitution. The committee has six months to
conclude its task. I will address
some of the substantial issues in another post but writing the constitution
itself is less of a problem than deciding the allocation of power that it
enacts. Until last week it had
been widely assumed that the MB continued to prefer a parliamentary system with
a weak president as they had long claimed. There were some doubts that this was the case and the MB
have routinely not carried out their routinely frequent threats to withdraw
confidence from the Ganzoury government appointed by the Army Council. They may now wish to wait until
the outcome of the election to see what division of powers they wish to
enshrine and how much control over the Egyptian government they parliamentary
delegation wishes to assert.

Two final points are worth pondering. Joseph had seven good years to prepare
for seven lean; Khairat Shater will be coming into power with the reserves of
the last decade of intense (but unevenly distributed) economic growth having
been dissipated. He may be in for
a more difficult time. The other
point is drawn from the historical sociology of revolution and refers us back
to the question of how to conceptualize the kaleidoscopic Egyptian reality of
the past year in which the pace of change continues to confuse and amaze. For the last century successive periods
of revolutionary upheaval and political change have brought new governments to
power and cemented the idea of republican democracy as the appropriate
mechanism of rule. What they have
never brought forward, despite many claims to the contrary by rulers and
external observers alike, is a party sufficiently disciplined and dedicated to
the pursuit of power to make an elected parliament function as a system of
rule. The Wafd was a popular mass
party with no significant local organizational participation. The military rulers after 1952 tried
successive experiments with the Liberation Rally and the Arab Socialist Union
before finally settling on the National Democracy party as a mechanism to
occupy political space. The MB and
their political party, the FJP, may finally (if perhaps only briefly) manage to
create a system of electoral institutions that allow a party not only to
participate in ruling the country but to govern it. Unfortunately such an experiment will not be, to
paraphrase Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid’s famous book, liberal. But it will be one on which Alexis de
Tocqueville will be smiling from whatever heaven shelters those who cast a cold
eye on revolutions.